Pat Meehan: Your Career is a Conversation

by Pat Meehan

Back in my sales manager days with the insurance company I worked for, we attended a management development seminar in Chicago. This was a team building type of seminar in the early 1980’s. I remember this seminar vividly, as I was so influenced by the last person who spoke to our group. This man was a long term employee with our company. He was the Vice-President of Sales & Marketing. He had also been a vice-president in five other departments of our company. This man was a truly “down-to-earth” individual with tremendous people skills. He had developed self-awareness at its highest form, and had such a positive attitude about life in general. He also was a stutterer. He didn’t have the problem of stuttering, he was just a stutterer.

In talking to us about our careers and where we wanted to go from here, he made a statement to us that made a permanent impression on my mind and my life. He said to us, “Your whole career is a conversation.” What a powerful statement of positive attitude this was, especially coming from a man who stuttered. It was a “simple dynamic.” In other words, it was a gigantic philosophy, yet so simple. He said, “Someone says something to you, and you say something back, and thus, an exchange of ideas begins to happen which will lead to many more conversations with many other people.”

Communication is the link that ties human beings together, and through communication, many chains of human connection are developed. Another way to describe this dynamic is to call it “Relationship Building.” We build relationships through communication with each other. Communication comes in four varieties

Speaking
Reading
Writing
Listening

I am communicating with you this very second as you are reading this sentence. You are communicating with me through listing to the content of these words. You may communicate with me someday by sending an e-mail on something you learned from this message. You may communicate with me by calling in on my radio talk show to express something you discovered in your self-awareness development from this reading. You and I may be co-communicating without ever physically meeting, as you teach what you have learned from this message to someone else you know. The communication passes from one to another in an endless network.

Your whole career is a conversation. Your whole career and life is your connection to many other people through the network of relationships that you have continually developed each day over time. Networking is a connection with people and groups of people that grows harmoniously throughout your life which creates an endless chain of limitless opportunities for you and the world around you.

Pat Meehan’s company, The Meehan Group is nationally recognized as an executive recruiting and outplacement consulting firm located in Evansville, Indiana and serves a wide variety of industries located across the USA …

Visit our Website: www.themeehangroup.com